What you can do with Blender

I saw this last night, a short film about a girl and her dragon. Here is the YouTube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ

and the link to the project site http://www.sintel.org/ . This is IMHO astounding work and the the fact that it is open source is a grand bonus.

I thought this would be an engrish version of http://www.willitblend.com/

Yeah, my wife told me about it after a Felicia Day twitter about it. Quite well done for animation and story. Minimalist and good.

Blender does seem to be a pretty good 3D application especially considering how it is free and open source. It was the first program I started working with 3D in even though I never got that far. Maybe I will go back to it once I have properly learned Maya when I want to do some work that I can't do with the education version of Maya.

Awww... :'( - That Sintel's really sad, i saw the twist coming though.

The Blender Foundation always does the best work to showcase their product, no surprise there, Their last effort was 2 years ago with Big Buck Bunny which proves the software can rival Maya or 3DS Max for character-driven cgi animation.

You can check out all the blender stuff at www.blender.org which has a videos page on features and gallery.

Its a shame that when getting into the industry the only programs that are seriously entertained are 3DS Max for architectual visualisation and games design and Maya for film and TV SFX animation. I suppose its just a case of Autodesk grabbing that marketshare right from the outset and consolidating when they bought up Maya for the suite.
Still.... for work outside of that racket and especially for freeware, Blender does look seriously good.

Wow... damn it, I wish I could learn how to USE stuff like this. My brain is immediately going, "CGI vids for COH, WOOT!" But then I look at programs like Maya and 3dS and my brain promptly melts.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

to get from nothing to rendered animation is rly hard work. you probably need a team of ppl unless you want to dedicate like years to it

My advice to anyone who wanted to learn 3DS Max or Maya would be to get the reduced price Autodesk Education Suite ($199 i think) which has full versions of 3DS Max, Maya, Mudbox and Softimage in it (amongst other stuff) available from the Autodesk site.
You can use it to learn the software in conjunction with those sites i mentioned.

You have to be registered as on a college course for a certain amount of hours per week to qualify (part-time & evening classes qualify too). Other than that the commercial full price of both Max ($3,495) & Maya ($4,995) are ridiculously expensive.

Shame Blender isn't used more in industry, but like i said... once industry standards are set in stone for a good long while (like Max for games & architectectual visualisation & Maya for Animation) and artists have spent years learning the software, it takes an enormous amount of innovation and price penetration to get them out of their entrenched positions as far as those being the industry standards.

As far as expectations go; from scratch and knowing nothing about 3ds Max you could probably get to about this capable in an academic year. Makes Blur Studio's 3ds max work on the 'Decieved' and 'Hope' sw:tor trailers seem a long way off doesn't it. =D

If you want to get into 3d then I wouldn't take a course on animation. Its basically 90% practise and 10% technical stuff, the thing that makes you better is observing RL where you can do for free once you know which buttons to press in maya. I've had animation classes in maya at the recommendation of a friend and it's literally 90% 'studio work' where you do your own thing...I could do that at home it was a huge waste of $$$ imo.

If I had to take a course I'd take rigging, becuase that's actually fairly technical and need some knowledge of scripting, and you need it for basically eveything.

Modeling and texturing once you get the fairly easy concept down is going to be the same concept for everything you ever model or texture. I'd take a drawing/concept design class over a modleing/textyruing class any day.

the reason to take maya/3dmax classes if basically learn the program.

Seeing as though we are talking about CGI in the context of superheroes i'll point out this sneaky little cross-forum link (because theres no way i'm reposting all these links. ) - Zbrush is incredible (and you don't need to rig the model with a skeleton to pose or animate).

Nuff' said, see post #69 and the links highlighted throughout for case studies of superhero competition goodness..